Appellate Highlights

• Year: 2025
• Citation: Vol. 38 No. 1 Pg. 35
• Pages: 35
• Date: 01 January 2025

Appellate HighlightsNo. Vol. 38 No. 1 Pg. 35Utah Bar JournalJanuary, 2025

Utah Law Developments

January 2025

by Rodney R. Parker, Dani Cepernich, Robert Cummings, and Andrew Roth

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following appellate cases of interest were recently decided by the Utah Supreme Court, Utah Court of Appeals, and United States Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. The following summaries have been prepared by the authoring attorneys listed above, who are solely responsible for their content.

Utah Supreme Court

State v. Willden

2024 UT 37 (September 5, 2024)

In this interlocutory appeal, the Utah Supreme Court interprets the language of Rule 16(b) of the Utah Rules of Criminal Procedure for the first time since its amendment in 2021. As amended, that rule provides that a criminal defendant's "disclosure obligations do not include .. attorney work product. Attorney work product protection is not subject to the exception in Rule 26(b)(6) of the Utah Rules of Civil Procedure." Utah R. Crim. P. 16(b)(4). The court held this subsection provides a limit on the disclosure obligations in subsections (1) through (3). Assuming the requested witness recordings fell within subsection (1)'s disclosure obligations, the court held that with the connection to Rule 26(b)(6) now "severed," the recordings constitute work product based on the definition set out in Gold Standard, Inc. v. Am. Barrick Res. Corp., 805 P.2d 164 (Utah 1990). The court additionally held, as a threshold matter, that appellants on interlocutory review are not required, as part of their burden on appeal, to show prejudice flowing from the asserted error.

Bingham v. Gourley

2024 UT 38 (September 5, 2024)

The supreme court upheld the constitutionality of the four-year statute of repose in the Utah Healthcare Malpractice Act against open courts and uniform operation of laws challenges. The court concluded that the plaintiff had not shown the legislature's decision that the statute would address a crisis in the health industry was not "fairly debatable," and that the "statute of repose is a reasonable means for achieving a legitimate

legislative goal: 'to protect the public' from the 'adverse effects' of rising medical malpractice insurance costs by 'providing] a reasonable time in which actions may be commenced against health care providers while limiting that time to a specific period for which professional liability insurance premiums can be reasonably and accurately calculated.'"

Utah Court of Appeals

Haskell v. Wakefield and Associates

2024 UT App 123 (September 6, 2024)

Claim and issue preclusion, two "branches" of the doctrine of res judicata, both require a prior adjudication to a final judgment on the merits. The Utah Court of Appeals previously clarified that, for purposes of claim preclusion, this requirement cannot be met by an earlier dismissal without prejudice. In this appeal, however, the court held that, for purposes of issue preclusion, an earlier dismissal without prejudice...